The Game Industry tm is in the worst state it's ever been.

[air_show]

I know there was a crash in the 80's but that's nothing to the dystopian horror show things are at now.

I am a Sims addict. I have a preposterous, obscene playtime logged on the Sims 4. It's flawed as shit and always has been but I've never in my life had a richer or more fulfilling character creator and it would arguably be my desert island game.

But the game has forced updates. You can't launch the game unless it is updated and if EA's servers aren't working, like I don't know, right now, then it is a 100% Get Fucked Idiot We Took Your Money situation where you can't enjoy the property you paid possibly hundreds of dollars for (I love Sims but it is disgusting).

I was able to keep a stable build for the game for around 2 years by not letting Origin update and running the game in offline mode, but one day, out of the blue, I am forced, 100% FORCED against my will to update to the EA app to play the game at all, and now I'm once again stuck with this ENDLESS cycle of updates and mod breakage and having my goddamn game locked out for me when it is absolutely 100% unnecessary.

You should not be forced to update a game, any game, to launch it. It's one thing if it's an online only game and you need all the players to be synched to the same version. But to do it in a game that can be played offline sans some online features is criminal. It should actually be illegal, but it's not, because we live in a capitalist shitshow nightmare and this whole death by a thousand cuts method of bleeding us dry these scumbags employ makes it so that the gaming populace never properly revolts and burns it all to the ground like they should.

I've been a video gamer for well over 30 years. I'm old, and while individual games are amazing, the industry itself is hands down the worst it has EVER been. We honestly need another crash.

 

[Vaeran]

I've been a video gamer for well over 30 years. I'm old, and while individual games are amazing, the industry itself is hands down the worst it has EVER been. We honestly need another crash.

I, too, hope thousands of people lose their jobs so you won't have to update games anymore, or whatever this thread is about.

 

[air_show]

You mean the constantly overworked and exploited employees who get regularly thrown away like garbage after the product is finished and the executives need bigger bonuses?

God forbid those massive slave mongering corporations fail and leave the market open for them to actually creatively thrive.

 

[Vaeran]

You're right that there are a lot of conversations that need to be had about the current state of the gaming industry, about wages and working conditions. Like any big industry, it's got plenty of problems and it often feels like there's little we can do about them from where we are other than voting with our wallets. It's frustrating. Framing it all in a rant about how it personally inconveniences you, though, probably isn't the best way to open a dialogue about these topics.

I snarked you off in my previous reply and I shouldn't have, so I'm sorry about that.

 

[air_show]

I'm just so tired of "conversations needing to be had". Decades upon decades now of wishy washy hand wringing have resulted in the industry taking inch by inch by inch and now they own miles upon miles.

My current frustration with this personal inconvenience just exemplifies that. It should really be illegal to force people to update their games and to permanently lock them out of single player experiences if they don't. That EA can get away with this behavior at all is appalling. And it really does seem like it will only ever get worse until something genuinely catastrophic happens.

The richer these bloodsuckers running the industry get, the more powerful they become. The more powerful they become, the more money they make. It's a poisonous self reinforcing circle and just one of many such capitalist systems ruining lives daily.

I just needed to vent.

 

[Eishtmo]

I get where you're coming from. From major games being big laden messes, rushed product launches, predatory monetization systems, regurgitated IPs and then there's the whole abuse culture seemingly every major publisher and studio has and tolerates, the "AAA" game industry is a cesspool that I find so little to like or desire from it that I can't stand that it still somehow exists.

The only thing that will keep gaming from being a pit of horrors is the fact that there is a lively and wonderful independent game industry growing up through the cracks of the awful. I recommend looking for them rather than wallowing in the nonsense.

 

[balder the brave]

I have no issue with patches and online gaming personally. I am disappointed that we seem to be in a creative lull. Remember this ~3 year period of the late XBox 360 Era to the early PS4 Era?

- Tom Bissell writing about how games are important and good
- Journey being the template for indie games
- Skyrim
- Red Dead Redemption
- Jennifer Hale and voice actors becoming prominent
- Bioware
- Kotaku
- Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite
- Bloodborne
- Steam
- Portal
- 3DS, street pass, Vita
- Early hints of VR

There was the sense that games were becoming this unique and amazing thing and were about to become even better and more creative.

The artistic ambition of games seems to have completely crashed down to Earth, and the goal of big studios now is simply to produce the most polished Assassin's Creed type game possible, and the goal of an indie game to produce the most accurate knock-off of a classic 16 bit game with more pastel colors and whimsey.

 

[Bongo]

AAA is in a severe rut, and the economic causes of that rut are on a trajectory to deepen in a way that might literally require an act of Congress to reverse. But the market for smaller games is healthier than it's ever been, on both the producer and consumer side.

 

[Olli]

Aside from the occasional Nintendo property, I've largely shifted to playing indie games. Partially it comes from platform choices (the only console I own right now is a Switch), but I do have a beefy PC for work purposes that could easily run a lot of the big AAA games if I cared to. I just don't care, enough, and everything I read about the big game companies - ActiBlizz, EA, Ubisoft, CDPR, you know them... - makes me want to play less.

 

[RT-55J]

I feel like y'all have more faith in the indie scene than I do. While there are sure plenty of examples of successful indie studios and games, the indie scene as a whole is rife with unsustainability and economic exploitation, just in different forms than in the AAA space.

 

[Exposition Owl]

I feel like y'all have more faith in the indie scene than I do. While there are sure plenty of examples of successful indie studios and games, the indie scene as a whole is rife with unsustainability and economic exploitation, just in different forms than in the AAA space.

For example, see this from the CEO of the studio tinyBuild. I’ve never played anything of theirs before, but this moved them into the “actively avoid” category for me.

 

[MetManMas]

I think at least part of the problem with the AAA space besides the obvious (Development costs too damn much) is that everybody wants to make these big, neverending games these days. The popularity of the sandbox genre is part of it; wanting to be the next big GaS service game printing all the money is another.

But seriously development costs too damn much. We've gone from Rockstar publishing games all over the place on 360/PS3 to having their only release in the PS4 era that's not a port or GTA Online expansion be Red Dead Redemption 2...which of course they were hoping Red Dead Online would take off with.

And I still think there's a lot of good in the indie space, but it's a real gamble if you wanna make something in that market. You're basically hoping someone will give you (good) publicity that gets you noticed and that you don't get buried under all the Minecraft clones and match-3 puzzle games.

 

[Issun]

I, personally, would be fine if they just stopped making video games for about 20 years to give me some time to catch up.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I don’t really play new games a whole lot, outside of mostly Nintendo stuff. I don’t think one could look at the 80’s, 90s and 00’s ecosystem of gaming and compare it favorably to recent times. Even most indie stuff isn’t as interesting as the average small PS1 or PS2 game. Not to mention all the remakes, while the vast majority of all the video games ever made are completely inaccessible outside of piracy.

 

[FelixSH]

I don’t really play new games a whole lot, outside of mostly Nintendo stuff. I don’t think one could look at the 80’s, 90s and 00’s ecosystem of gaming and compare it favorably to recent times. Even most indie stuff isn’t as interesting as the average small PS1 or PS2 game. Not to mention all the remakes, while the vast majority of all the video games ever made are completely inaccessible outside of piracy.

Couldn't disagree more, there have never been so many different types of games out as now, and many cheaper than they have been in the 90s. There are so many cool puzzle games now, way more clever than anything I can think of from that time. There are genres that didn't exist back then, like Walking Simulators, or generally games with interesting concepts that don't include combat. Granted, might be me not knowing the library of the PS1 and PS2 that well, but even with platformers, there is nothing like Celeste or Super Meat Boy. Disco Elysium is one of the best RPGs of all time. There are great visual novels like the work of Christine Love. Kero Blaster is an action game that is actually fun for me to play. What Remains of Edith Finch is a great, if short, game. Hatoful Boyfriend is delightful. Life is Strange offered me two of the most intense moments I have ever experienced in any medium. Undertale is up there with the best RPGs from back then.

Sorry, this isn't directed at you, R.R. Bigman, I just used you post as a jump-off point. I hope it doesn't feel antagonistic, it certainly isn't intended that way.

There are games I haven't played, which look amazing. Adios seems to be a short, narrative game. Alba is about taking pictures of wildlife, Beyond Blue about exploring the ocean. Astrologaster is delightful, and the Dominique Pamplemousse games are some of the most delightful and simply singing (in more sense than one) games I have ever experienced.

There are problems in the indie-scene, when it comes to how they treat their employees, no question. But the amount of interesting games, and simply genres and subgenres, with games that are way better than just in the experimental phase, is higher than it ever was. Behind the Frame, Coffee Talk, Gorogoa, Journey. All on my wishlist, looking great.

I could go on forever, I feel. There is just so, so much great, fun or at least interesting stuff out there, more than I will ever be able to play. More than there ever was. I don't care about the big studios, indies got me covered for decades. Like, I remember something like ten years ago, when there was some problem regarding always online, or something, for a SimCity game? Dunno what exactly, but that was the point when EA was dead to me. And for most big studios, I can agree that the games are horribly boring to me. If it were only those, I would agree. I actually felt that way, that gaming got really stale for me, when we were in the second half of the 00s, before indies took off.

Doesn't mean we should not talk about the big problems in the indie scene, but I simply don't know enough about them to say anything of substance. Which is a problem in itself.

 

[air_show]

In my opinion games themselves are great. In any tier of the industry there are always great titles that are worth playing every year. What bothers me is things like:

-Things that used to be unlockable content in games from the 90's and 00's are increasingly being made paid dlc and microtransactional instead. Example: Devil May Cry 5 makes you buy music tracks from previous games if you want to change background music.
-Single player games requiring internet connections and mandatory updates to play. Example: The aforementioned Sims 4.
-Expansion packs that feel like content that finishes an incomplete game, rather than new content that adds value to a complete game. Example: Basically anything not by Fromsoft.
-Increasingly intrusive monetization incentivizing grindy, frustrating, or tedious design to leach more money from the players. Example: Overwatch 2 locking characters behind lengthy grinds and offering them to be unlocked immediately via purchase. This one's particularly egregious as its immediate predecessor, which doesn't even exist anymore, made all characters available to everyone at all times.
-Crunchy development cycles that treat employees as disposable resources to be burned out, while executives without a single creative bone in their body take home OBSCENE paychecks.

 

[Issun]

Those problems you describe are indeed the result of the same thing that has been causing problems in nearly every other industry. Capitalism has been so entirely unshackled over the last 40+ years thanks to union-busting, deregulation, and eroding faith in institutions that companies don't even really have to pretend to care about their customers or their workers. I wish I had an answer to any of this myself, but unless the powers that be get a truly critical mass of pushback, things aren't going to get much better.

 

[Bongo]

I feel like y'all have more faith in the indie scene than I do. While there are sure plenty of examples of successful indie studios and games, the indie scene as a whole is rife with unsustainability and economic exploitation, just in different forms than in the AAA space.

It's all relative. It's not that it's good to be an indie today, it's just that it's mostly been worse in the past.

 

[Olli]

It's not like a small dev team can't suffer from a toxic culture, it's just that a bigger team and a bigger budget provide more opportunities for things to go poorly. You get more people in positions of power, and that opens opportunities for abuse. It's not a problem unique to the gaming industry, but there are factors in the industry that make the problem worse, such as the lack of unionization and diversity in the workforce.

 

[Violentvixen]

I will note that there has been an amazing increase in representation. There are so many games I've played in the last few years and wished I'd seen as a young girl. I've heard similar from people who are non-white and/or queer.

Of course the problem not fixed and I will laugh in your face if you try and tell me there is no sexism, racism, homophobia, ablelism in games. But you are seeing far more diversity in characters both in AAA and indie games than there was in the 90s, and the games are things the average consumer can easily access.

Maybe that is mainly corporate Diversity & Inclusion initiatives, but having more games with someone I can identify with who serves a function in the story other than being a plot device to rescue and isn't wearing gross boob armor is a great silver lining.

Still an overall dark cloud and I'd much rather games were inclusive without all this internet always on shit and workers were treated better. There's no reason to connect all these things but it's just how time has aligned I suppose.

 

[gogglebob]

List of random things I have had to deal with over the years because of "the games industry":

· Nintendo has always had the reputation for manufacturing reliable hardware. I have never understood this, because I spent approximately a million hours of my childhood blowing on carts and praying to Nintinficus, God of Gaming, that I wouldn't just see a flashing blue screen every time I wanted to play Super Mario Bros. 3. Despite owning every "cleaning kit" and knowing every "trick" available, this was apparently an okay thing for gamers to have to deal with.

· Almost as soon as "gaming" was a word, game designers felt threatened by the rental industry, and artificially inflated difficulty/"game length" in ways that were bonkers. Nowadays, we barely notice some of these issues thanks to emulation/save states, but back in the day, it could take a week to complete a game that could otherwise take twenty (enjoyable) minutes. Let me tell you about the many codes that had to be entered just to continue after a game over in Double Dragon 2.

· Relatedly, I have always been told that save batteries on cartridges were expensive. As a result, many games included "password systems" that were often as obtuse as they were eccentric. Is that a l or an I? Better figure it out, or you will lose all of your progress forever.

· Updates and "always online" are a pain, but we used to never have a possibility of updates. Final Fantasy 3/Final Fantasy 6 is one of the best games out there... and it has more glitches than one of the hour long episodes of Reboot. There are basic things like the "darkness" status effect not doing anything, and apocalyptic glitches like "use sketch on the wrong enemy, and your save data is erased." There was never any illusion that these problems would ever be fixed. You paid $80 for the latest Square release, and you lived in fear of using one of the characters because of a warning in Gamepro.

· Do not get me started on PC gaming. Even beyond the old yarn of purchasing a PC title before approximately 2005 being a crapshoot of whether or not your graphics card would actively puke on you in response to a spec requirement, there was an entire genre of games that existed exclusively to sell strategy guides or encourage the usage of "tip lines". Yes, back in the days before DLC, game companies made additional cash on selling you solutions through 1900 numbers. Nikstlitselpmur!

· And since I have gotten started on PC gaming: Nintinficus fugging help you if you had to deal with any "anti-piracy" measures from the era. Everybody always wants to talk about things like pirate wheels or whatever other "feelies", but there were random games that would include some weird "look at the manual" puzzle like 30% of the way through the game, and it was clearly an anti-piracy thing in retrospect, but at the time, it was just confusing as heck. You want me to look where for what now? Something in the real world is the solution to beating a level? Huh?

· Back to the console wars: I own a 32X and a Virtual Boy. I might own their entire American-released game libraries. I am talking about six games. You want to know the MSRP for these systems when they were released?

· Oh! American-released! Want to know what happened back in the day if a game had too much text, and a company arbitrarily decided they didn't feel like localizing it? Violence happened! I lost my best friend in the Seiken Densetsu 3 wars!

· Moving forward a little bit, let me tell you about the horrors of any game that wasn't a sandbox or RPG in the Playstation 2 era. You needed that bullet point for "50 hours of gameplay", so there were ridiculous "unlock requirements" for grand swaths of games. A memory card with everyone unlocked in a fighting game was more valuable than the game itself. "Costume unlocks" is a phrase that sends a chill down my spine to this very day. I will take a "fighter's pass" for $15 any day over "beat 100 characters in survival mode to unlock Costume #4".

· This era also saw a fair few "update releases", like how Devil May Cry 3 has two different versions thanks to player feedback. On one hand, this was a step forward beyond "this is broken forever", but it also meant buying any given game "new" was a gamble. Videogames going on sale was one thing, but now there was the possibility that you could pay full price at release, and then a better, cheaper version would be available a year later? And save transferring was somehow impossible? So I wasted my money and time if I wanted to see the inevitable new super boss?

· Videogame store online "credits". God help me if I have to figure out the exchange rate between microsoft points and eshop nintendo points. Just another barrier to downloading Mega Man 9 that existed as some kind of weird tax dodge.

· Everybody seems to gloss over how the Xbox 360 was dominant in its console generation because it was the only place that had a damn clue what to do with online play. And it wasn't great! But Sony and Nintendo chasing what little there was there was extra scary. In a weird parallel to the PC days, it was a crapshoot on whether you were buying a game that would have "easy" online play (through GameSpy, for some reason?), or you had to be subscribed to a proprietary online service.

· And through it all, "big studios" have always been chasing the latest popular genre, so whether we are looking at FF7-alikes, GTA-alikes, Skyrim-alikes, or whatever, there were about 50/50 odds that your favorite franchise was going to include "RPG elements" or some other buzzsystem at the expense of actual fun. We are always, at any given moment, about three seconds away from The Legend of Zelda having a Deathmatch mode.

And I note these things not to refute anyone or anything in this thread, or even the central premise. Just saying that The Games Industry has been pulling this nonsense as long as there has been a Games Industry, and it is impossible to say there has ever been "pure" gaming. Whether it is online-based DLC BS or an invincible boss in arcade Battletoads, "gaming" has always had a healthy connection to decisions based entirely on profit.

 

[Patrick]

· Almost as soon as "gaming" was a word, game designers felt threatened by the rental industry, and artificially inflated difficulty/"game length" in ways that were bonkers. Nowadays, we barely notice some of these issues thanks to emulation/save states, but back in the day, it could take a week to complete a game that could otherwise take twenty (enjoyable) minutes. Let me tell you about the many codes that had to be entered just to continue after a game over in Double Dragon 2.

Lots of good points. For this one, I'd point even earlier to arcade game design mentality. Games had to be unfairly difficult, or there wouldn't be a reason to put in more quarters. lots of early home releases were ports or similar games.